Many electronic devices are capable of giving audio signals to alert a user of new voicemail, new email, instant messages, or incoming calls. A personal computer, for example, alerts a user to new email or instant messages with an audio signal via an audio component such as a speaker.
Other electronic devices, such as mobile stations or PDAs, are generally provided with an audio component for producing a audio signal in order to announce an incoming call, or alert the mobile station user of new voicemail or a scheduled appointment. The mobile station is often provided with a set of prestored audio signals, from which the user may choose a more individualized audio signal for one or more of the actions of the mobile station that require an audible alert. Similarly, computers are often provided with a pre-stored set of audio signals for alerting the user to new email or other actions. The prestored audio signals usually have ordinary ringing tones, as well as melodies from familiar pieces of music.
The use of mobile stations in public areas, as well as the number of computers in a confined area, have increased rapidly in recent years, causing the apparent risk that one or more neighboring electronic devices may produce the same audio signal, causing confusion as to which electronic device is producing the audio signal. Even though the number of prestored audio signals has increased, users are still constrained to a standard set of audio signal choices as programmed by the manufacturer of the electronic device. Hence, confusion may still arise from neighboring electronic devices producing the same audio signal.
Presently, mobile stations offer the ability to program an individualized audio signal by entering notes onto a staff. The mobile station then determines the tones to be played based on the location of the notes placed on the staff. However, one of the disadvantages to the above-mentioned technique is that the user is assumed to have extensive knowledge of music theory in order to create a melody on a staff. In addition, the task of placing notes on a staff can be laborious and time consuming for longer ring signals.
In an alternative approach, a new audio signal may be acoustically input by the user through a microphone attached to the mobile station. The acoustic input is sampled, converted into digital form, and stored in a memory. Subsequently, this digitally stored audio signal may be converted into analog signals and supplied to a speaker for announcing, for example, an incoming call. This approach also has its drawbacks in that the stored digital audio signal is essentially an exact representation of the original acoustic input. The input will have a less than perfect quality, and even if digital data compression is applied to the stored audio signal, the data will still require a significant amount of memory.
Therefore, there is a need for a system that a non-musician can use, without having music theory knowledge, to generate their own unique audio output signal.